Fugitive software guru McAfee questions own 'paranoia'

By Dan Nakaso dnakaso@mercurynews.com

Posted:
11/20/2012 04:45:35 PM PST

Updated:
11/20/2012 07:39:13 PM PST

Silicon Valley software guru John McAfee continued to taunt authorities in Belize Tuesday with media interviews and a blog that outlines his purported persecution by police even as he remained a self-described fugitive on the run.

McAfee's latest blog Tuesday questioned his own paranoia while promising a series of audio recordings that McAfee pledged will be "devastating."

"The media has portrayed me as paranoid," McAfee wrote late Tuesday. "I am a poor judge, since if I am paranoid, it is a paranoid mind judging itself."

McAfee, the founder of the anti-virus company that bears his name, remains wanted as a "person of interest" in the murder of his neighbor on the Belizean island of Ambergris Caye.

He remains in hiding with a female companion, often distorting his appearance and wearing disguises to hide in plain sight as he spied on police repeatedly searching his beachfront compound, he claims on his blog.

Following an earlier April raid on McAfee's home by police apparently searching for a meth lab, McAfee wrote Tuesday that "I began a program of observation and recording of everything that happened to me. I planted tiny POV video cameras and sound recorders on myself, some of my dogs, all around my property, in my cars, on my boats, at the Studio 54 bar in Orange Walk, on trees, in bushes, -- everywhere I could. The first two months were audio only. I knew that The Government was recruiting friends, neighbors and acquaintances for information about me and for help with 'dealing with me' in some fashion. Most declined. No-one would ever believe my story, so recording it was my only option."

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Earlier this week, McAfee blogged that he watched police search his home and was able to walk up to his property by mimicking a limp, darkening his face, neck and hands with shoe polish, dyeing his beard and hair nearly white, stuffing his cheeks with bubble gum and distorting his face by stuffing a tampon into his right nostril to give "my nose an awkward, lopsided, disgusting appearance."

"On subsequent days using different disguises, I did the same general thing, one day selling tamales and burritos that I had purchased wholesale from a real vendor, on another pretending to be a drunk German tourist with a partially bandaged face and wearing speedo swimming trunks and a distasteful, oversized Hawaiian shirt and yelling loudly at anyone who would listen," McAfee wrote. "At 67 years of age it was quite a spectacle."

On Nov. 11 the body of fellow American expatriate Gregory Viant Faull, 52, was found with a single gunshot to the back of the head in Faull's home two doors down from McAfee's compound.

About a month before he was murdered, Faull had hand-delivered a letter to the San Pedro Town Council complaining about McAfee's security detail and dogs.

Asked if Belizean police are embarrassed that they are unable to find McAfee even as he grants interviews and condemns police on his blog, police spokesman Raphael Martinez told this newspaper Tuesday, "We have grown not to believe what McAfee is saying. Several things he has been saying beg the question whether or not he is living in the real world.

"I am not sure if he's the one doing this," Martinez said. "It's alleged he's been speaking to the media."

A person responding to a message sent by this newspaper to an email address that has been used before by McAfee offered no clarity for police. "Their problem, not mine," the person wrote.

In a brief email exchange, the author did not indicate where McAfee was hiding Tuesday.

Belizean police have a force of 1,000 officers, most of them on the mainland. They have sent an unspecified number of investigators and officers to Ambergris Caye to investigate Faull's killing and to search for McAfee, "but not a lot of resources have been placed into finding him," Martinez said.

No one has been arrested in Faull's murder, Martinez said.

Police are primarily focused on anti-crime efforts that have resulted in dozens of gang and drug-related murders this year, Martinez said.

McAfee's website Tuesday posted a garbled six-minute audio recording of an apparent conversation in sometimes broken English, along with a post from McAfee that promised more "recordings slowly over the next few months as the World digests them. ... I have many, many recordings -- some 6,000 hours in total. They are devastating."